Obsolescence and Nostalgia

In The Anxiety of Obsolescence (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), Kathleen Fitzpatrick makes several arguments concerning the latest call of the “death of the novel” due to new media.  After pointing out that the introduction of a new technology always heralds the death of some form or another of literary expression, The Anxiety of Obsolescence argues from the very beginning that “the ways we speak and write about new media – and particularly the means by which we express our concerns about the world that new media forms are eroding or leaving behind – may reveal more about our own entrenched cultural ideologies than they do about the media themselves” (9).

As I look around at my own culture, it seems to me that we spend a lot of time and energy looking back at the greatness of what was, rather than looking forward to the possibilities of the new.  This does not just apply to digital media and technology; I’ve noticed the phenomenon in attitudes towards family, education, gender roles, child-raising, and government, just to name a few.  In short – it’s pervasive and not limited to any one field. 

Tradition, the Reader, and the Digital Author

As the title implies, my focus today is upon the implications of digital media with regards to how digital authors and narratives interact with the past as well as adapt to a new medium.  As a continuation of my response to the essays in Seán Burke’s Authorship, I again refer to my reading list for a complete list of the essays and introductory statements I have read thus far.

This focus moves me into stickier theoretical ground than I have yet covered in this blog. Referring specifically to Seán Burke’s section introduction, “The Twentieth Century Controversy”, T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, and Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author”, my intent is to ponder ways in which the digital medium influences our perceptions of subjectivity in writing as well as the role of the reader.  Though I wrote in my previous post that I didn’t intend to handle it this way, this time I am going to examine the three essays individually, using Burke’s section introduction as a springboard.

Autobiography and Digital Temporality

This week, I journeyed through a few centuries worth of authorship theory courtesy of Seán Burke’s Authorship (Edinburgh University Press, 1995).  My reading list has been updated with the selections I chose to read.  I chose my essays with care; it goes without saying (at least to me) that I should read them all, and I intend to.  For the purposes of my independent study, however, I chose what I thought would best help me gain an understanding of authorship as it has been discussed to this point.

It is not my intention in this or any subsequent entries to give a summary of what I read (if you want more information, check out the reading list; all of the material I’ve read is readily available and highly anthologized), but instead to discuss the implications on the various theories of authorship to digital culture as I see them so far.  Since it would make this and subsequent entries absurdly long (and I haven’t figured out what the WP equivalent to LJ-cuts is yet), I’m not going to go theorist-by-theorist.  Rather, I’m going to consider my responses with respect to the three main positions with respect to authorship:  author-as-subject, author-as-dead, and attempts at finding the happy medium between those two.

Digital Collaboration

This entry is written primarily in response to Andrew Bennett’s chapter “Collaboration” in The Author (Routledge, 2005).

After pointing out that the Oxford English Dictionary identifies the first use of the word “collaborator” in 1802, Andrew Bennett surmises that the idea of authorial collaboration only became significant  within “what Jack Stillinger calls the Romantic ‘myth of the solitary genius'” (Stillinger 201, qtd. in Bennett 94).  Because authors were arguably not considered to be autonomous nor their works original before this time, the need to use a word like collaboration to describe situations in which more than one author (or authority) had a claim on the content of a text was simply not present.  In this chapter, Bennett explores the different ways in which the idea of multiple authorship has been theorized, criticized, and presented throughout the history of literary criticism since the seventeenth century.  Though he mentions several versions of collaboration including co-authorship, editing, plagiarism, and even reliance on social and psychological context, Bennett comes to the conclusion that attribution theory, though its focus is ostensibly on the various “voices” found within a given text, actually gives more importance to the idea of authorial intent than it perhaps intends.  For the moment, I agree.